Scripting their own lives

The fourth chapter, “Scripting Their Own Lives,” focuses on the work of memory and postmemory in the narrativization of experience through selection, elimination, focalizing of certain details and imposition of a structure that closes the gap between fictionalized and remembered stories. It argues that survivors, in the process of remembering, sharing and retelling their experiences, transmute experience into coherent narratives that become fixed through their retelling over the years. It also demonstrates that postmemory transforms piteous tales of violence and victimhood constructed both by traditional and oral historians into triumphalist sagas of survival in recalling and reconstructing the past. Survivors’ reinscription of themselves from victims to agents underlines the process through which they use memory to script their own lives and gain agency.